# 12.2. Wrong Charset!

Actually, there are two types of charset errors, which seem to be independent from each other at least to a certain extend:

1. error message "Wrong charset (unknown)! Setting to default (us-ascii)!" when starting X/KDE.

2. error message "KCharset: Wrong Charset!" while working in X/KDE and launching/closing apps.

To fix (1), first find the locale directory within the tree you installed KDE to (usually $KDEDIR/share/locale). Next, put a plain text file named "charset" in the appropriate directory for your language, say en, and make it world-readable. The file should consist of one single line indicating the charset, e.g. us-ascii or iso-8859-1 for most European languages. You might need to restart KDE, too.

If it still doesn't work--as far as (1) is concerned--put a copy of the "charset" file into the subdirectory for your country as well, e.g. not only into en, but into en_UK or en_US as well. Then set all of the three languages supported by KDE (in the "locale settings" dialogue box) to the same language and country.

As for (2), it is actually just a harmless warning message and it's safe to ignore it. The way to get around it is to refrain from starting KDE apps from a window. :-)

But if you really want to get rid of those messages, you can try making sure that the language settings in the KDE Control Center under Desktop->Language are all the same. In my case, I set them all to be "Default language (C)" and the problem promptly disappeared.